Market Wrap: Late Day Sell-Off On Transports, Oil

Stocks ended the day on the downside with more deals and earnings news driving the momentum on Wall Street today. All three major indexes closed down fractionally. The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded in a narrow range of about 40 points, and ended the day down 7 points. The NASDAQ and S&P 500 both closed down 2 points.

Mary Thompson was CNBC’s “Eye on the Floor.” She said that without much economic news to digest, most of today’s movement came with an early pop in tech stocks and then lower turns in the energy and metal sectors.

ExxonMobil , American Express and Alcoa were the major Dow laggards. United Technologies , 3M and Hewlett-Packard all moved up, keeping the blue chip index relatively unchanged.

Energy stocks couldn’t pick up steam even as crude oil traded at $64 per barrel midday – before pulling back on weekly inventory data that showed a decline in crude supply but an increase in natural gas inventories. Crude oil closed up at 63.72 per barrel.

The Dow Transports index also pulled back today on weakness from FedEx which delivered strong second-quarter profits but forecast less-than-stellar third quarter earnings.

And NYSE Group shareholders overwhelmingly agreed to a $14.6 billion takeover of the European securities market, Euronext NV . NYSE Group CEO John Thain was on “Squawk Box” this morning to discuss the merger with Maria Bartiromo. He said the next logical place for the NYSE to expand would be Asia.